"I'm ready!"
And the males sang back:
"I'm on my way!"
8
LELAND said, "How do you give an enema to an elephant?"
"Diplomatically," Roger suggested.
Susan Morgan sighed and scowled at them from the other side of Queenie. "Will you boys get serious long enough to get this done? There's a lot at stake here."
"Especially for Queenie," Leland responded. Roger giggled.
Susan didn't know why she bothered. Leland and Roger were in fact both older than she was. But they were unable or unwilling to repress what she thought of as their frat-boy/med-student tendency toward the gross-out... what they would have described as irreverent humor.
The procedure they were about to undertake wasn't an enema but, as Leland had observed yesterday, it was close enough for rock and roll. What they were getting ready for was the last stage of a process Susan was pretty sure had never been tried on an elephant, in vitro fertilization. If it was successful, in about twenty-two months Queenie would give birth to a baby that was half Elephas maximus and half Mammuthus primigenius.
In laymen's terms, half Indian elephant, half woolly mammoth. SUSAN Morgan had been working for Howard Christian for almost eight years, but had never thought of it that way. She was circus people, third generation, and she worked for the circus. If that circus was owned by a network, which was owned by an Internet service provider, which was owned by some vast tax-evading offshore holding company that was owned by Howard Christian, who gave an elephant fart?
Susan was often at the head of that thundering parade, trotting along beside the leader, but she was not a performer. The spotlight never sought her out. She had no stage presence, and didn't want any. There was a Russian known as the Great Kristov who handled the glamorous part of the show, who wore the spangled tights and flashed the perfect teeth. Kristov was touted as the world's greatest animal handler, but the truth was that if it hadn't been for Susan and two big cat behaviorists doing the endless training behind the scenes, Kristov wouldn't have lasted a week in his big finale, which included four elephants, eight lions and tigers, and eight white horses.
There were those who said the day of animal acts was, or at least should be, over. They said it was barbarism to teach our animal cousins unnatural behavior, or to have them in captivity at all. Susan understood their point of view and had witnessed abuses, but as long as she was in charge her twenty-six elephants would lack nothing, and would get only the best treatment while working, and guaranteed care in retirement. She preferred to think of her relationship with her animals as a partnership, as it was with the best mahouts in Thailand and India and Sri Lanka, where she had spent three years teaching and learning after getting her D.V.M. She was the first in her family to go to college, a great source of pride to her grandfather.
She had heard of Howard Christian and his mammoth-cloning project and wasn't sure she approved, though the thought of getting to know an actual mammoth was almost too seductive to contemplate.
When Howard Christian sent out the emergency call for the world's best elephant handler, he was informed that there were many who were about equally good, but he already employed one of the best at the winter headquarters of the circus, in Sarasota, Florida.
A few hours later a man named Warburton picked his way carefully through piles of elephant dung and made Susan an offer she couldn't refuse.
NOW Susan checked the tension on the elephant press as the two mad doctors prepared their diabolical instruments of torture down at Queenie's other end. The procedure actually would have been more of a discomfort than torture, but it was academic. Queenie wouldn't feel a thing. Susan had administered a dose of azaperone an hour earlier as a calming agent, to assist the sometimes touchy process of getting her into the sling without alarming her. Then she was led into the elephant press, which was basically like a cattle chute with sides that could compress around an elephant and hold her immobile even if she got frisky.
After that, all Susan had to do was administer the big dose of carfentanil and assist the operation by monitoring Queenie's vital signs, standing ready to pump doses of diprenorphine and/or naltrexone into her if she got in any respiratory trouble.
The comedy team of Leland and Roger had been lucky. They were very experienced at the process of in vitro fertilization with cattle and horses. With an elephant, all you'd need was a bigger probe, right?
Wrong. They had made an attempt to inseminate Queenie without the press and the lift and the drugs, and were lucky to be alive. And so the call had gone out for an elephant handler and a vet, and Howard had found both in the person of Susan Morgan.
SUSAN had been flown to Los Angeles in a black private jet. At LAX she was limoed to a helicopter which deposited her at the base of the Resurrection Tower, then whisked to Howard Christian's office. It finally began to seem real to her, shaking hands with the man whose face she had seen on many magazine covers.
"You want to clone a mammoth, right?" she said. Christian sailed a copy of the secrecy agreement over his desk and sat back in his chair. Susan signed.
Howard Christian had driven her to Santa Monica in a car he said was a 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow V-12. She had no reason to doubt him. The front looked a lot like a Rolls-Royce to her and the rear was a '30s version of a car of the future. The inside was luxurious enough, with a lot of maple wood trim. Cars didn't do much for her, though she tried to feign interest.
Their destination was a large but ordinary steel-sided warehouse in a district near the airport that had dozens of warehouses just like it. He drove through a big open door and parked beside a dozen trucks making deliveries. Then they dodged guys with hand trucks and dollies and forklifts unloading and stacking an amazing variety of stuff, most of it new in the box. Everybody was in a huge hurry. Howard Christian was used to paying big bonuses for work done very quickly.
Christian dug in one of his vest pockets and came up with a laminated I.D. badge with Susan's picture on it. She was pretty sure it was her driver's license photo, probably obtained from the Florida DMV. These people worked fast.
In one corner was a big concrete cube, and in it was a door of the type used on refrigerated meat lockers. It wasn't cold on the other side, but there was a second door at the end of a long room with a dozen heavy parkas on hooks and insulated boots and gloves in cubbies. They donned the cold-weather gear and Christian punched a code into a pad beside the inner door.
And there it was. Sitting back on its massive haunches, leaning a little to the right against a support that was no longer there, a looming mass of long, tangled, reddish gold hair. The first specimen of Mammuthus primigenius Susan had ever been close to, but judging from the many photos she had seen, possibly the most complete carcass ever recovered.
The animal was still largely in situ, reminding her of a museum diorama. The base was wrapped in black plastic, and it looked like they had brought a large chunk of frozen tundra with the animal.
It didn't smell very good. No matter. Susan was used to working in elephant houses, which weren't very sweet, either.
She took in the humps on top of the head and on the shoulders. She moved around the front of the animal and inspected the tusks, which were fifteen feet long and turned like a corkscrew. She had never heard an explanation of why mammoths had needed tusks that big; surely they would be a hindrance in many things.
She took off her glove and ran her hand over the ancient ivory, and smiled.
"The only work we've done on him so far is back here, of course," Christian said, and guided her around the mammoth's left side. Then she was peering into the incisions that had been made to get at the beast's testicles. Mammoths carried them internally.